Wednesday, May 11, 2011

This is a book about the too brief life of a poor Italian immigrant... it is the story of his beginnings in Indrodaqua, L'Aquila, Abruzzi, where he was born in 1894, his emigration in 1910 and life in America.

Between 1872 and 1924 fully one third of the Italian people, mostly from the south, il Mezzogiorno, abandoned their homeland. There were few ways out of the crushing poverty and Italy's poor were chained to a life of subsistence farming.

This book meant a lot to me because both of my grandfathers, Orazio from Abruzzi, and Domenico from Calabria left their homelands and families and worked building the railroads in Virginia and Pennsylvania. They lived hard lives, but never gave up.